si dawson

Now, from a title like that, you may be think­ing I'm talk­ing about those life­time events that mark our place in his­tory — ala Bill Gates sell­ing DOS to IBM, or Lawn Chair Larry.

No, I'm talk­ing about the moments that define our char­ac­ter, and as a result, ulti­mately us as human beings.

It breaks down like this. Any­one can be mag­nan­i­mous, com­pas­sion­ate or lov­ing in good times. What truly defines us is how we behave when things go wrong.

That's right, when some­thing or some­one pisses us off. The neigh­bour runs over our dog, our girl­friend runs off with a leper or some­one just doesn't quite behave the way we want them to (which is really a con­trol issue on our part, but I digress).

I once heard the def­i­n­i­tion of matu­rity as "The dif­fer­ence in time between our emo­tional & ratio­nal responses to a situation."

That's suc­cinct, but I don't nec­es­sar­ily believe that what's ratio­nal is always what's best.

Is it ratio­nal to be uncon­di­tion­ally lov­ing towards some­one that is treat­ing you like shit? No, but it sure as hell is the fastest way to defuse the sit­u­a­tion. See also: Gandhi. It worked out pretty well for him, except for, you know, right at the end.

A less suc­cinct but more accu­rate def­i­n­i­tion might be "The dif­fer­ence in time between our fear & love based responses to a situation."

As we get more mature, our love based responses get closer & closer to the sur­face, and that time delay between fear & love gets ever shorter until it dis­ap­pears altogether.

For exam­ple, I know when I was younger, kids scream­ing or leav­ing mess every­where used to drive me mad. I mean, really crazy. Grow­ing up as the old­est of eight might have done that to me. Heh. These days though, I watch myself, & my first reac­tion is just "Is it happy scream­ing? Ok, that's cool." As for mess, well, they're kids. You gen­tly guide & pro­vide a con­sis­tent exam­ple over a period of years, & even­tu­ally they'll sort it out, but there's no rush, they've got a ton of other learn­ing to do too.

This is where those minor daily upsets are actu­ally a good thing. They pro­vide feed­back in two ways:

1. Are we still instinc­tively react­ing badly?
2. How long is it tak­ing us to calm down afterwards?

The first tells us whether we still have more healing/growing to do in this area, while the sec­ond is a quan­tifi­able mea­sure of the progress that we're making.

This doesn't mean I think you should wel­come bad/upsetting events into your life, but given that these sorts of things tend to hap­pen any­way, why not take advan­tage of them?

Ulti­mately, it's this ongo­ing col­lec­tion of upset­ting or unex­pected sit­u­a­tions & our reac­tions to them. That's what defines us as people.

As we grow & improve, these things bother us less & less.. & we become bet­ter people.

I guar­an­tee you one thing. If you can remain pos­i­tive & lov­ing when every­thing is falling apart around you, you're going to be incred­i­ble when times are good.